SEO Shopping Cart Tips for Expiring Products

What do you do with those expiring product pages on your site?  Do you archive them or simply delete them from your shopping cart?  There are valuable SEO implications not always considered by site owners for those expiring product pages.  Even with a short shelf life, these are pages that can pick up valuable inbound links in a short amount of time which simply can’t be tossed aside.  Expiring products or promotional pages can be handled in a way that’s most beneficial to users while also maximizing the SEO benefit by re-purposing any link juice that might still exist for these “dead” pages.

Here are a few different scenarios to consider and some valuable SEO shopping cart tips for those expiring products:

If a promotion or product goes out of stock temporarily and you fully expect to restock or rerun the promotion, you’ll want to leave the page active on the site.  You will, however, need to indicate that the product is, in fact, temporarily out of stock or the promotion has temporarily ended, while leaving the page active. Do not de-activate or pull the page off the site when the promotion or product goes out temporarily only to re-activate the page when the product is re-stocked. From an SEO perspective, that’s bad.

If the product goes out of stock or the promotion ends forever, you have 2 options to choose from.  You can either leave the product page up with an “out of stock” or “end of promotion” notice on the page, or you can redirect (301) the old page back to another existing page.  Either:

An equivalent or exchangeable product pageA primary category, topic or department page (1 level up from product page)Or, back to your home page

If a promotion or a product is updated or permanently replaced, handle the page in similar fashion to a promotion or a product that goes out of stock permanently. 301 redirect it back to an equivalent product page, back to the primary category or department page, or back to the home page.

Whatever you decide to do with those expiring product pages, don’t just delete them from your shopping cart software.  The best option under any of these scenarios is to redirect to an equivalent product page for that old item. The second best option would be to redirect that product page back to the primary category, topic or department page. The last option to use, of course, if the first 2 are not possible (for whatever reason) would be to simply redirect back to the home page.

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